


happiness is a firecracker sitting on my headboard

by Ahigheroctave



Category: Glee
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-06
Updated: 2013-05-06
Packaged: 2017-12-10 13:57:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/786803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ahigheroctave/pseuds/Ahigheroctave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Happiness was never mine to  hold.</p>
            </blockquote>





	happiness is a firecracker sitting on my headboard

**Author's Note:**

> Some pretty severe trigger warnings, not too graphic though.

This is the story of Kitty Wilde’s life: She builds kingdoms to watch them burn down.

:…:

Her best kept secret is, the first time she doesn’t hold the match.

She met Juliana Leavitt on her first day of Kindergarten, they are assigned seats next to her and they both have Cinderella backpacks. When you’re five-years-old, this is reason enough to become best friends. And over the next six years, they have their first crushes together (on Valentine’s Day in fifth grade, hers throws her secret-admirer carnation on the ground of the school bus and she cries), they experiment with makeup and her mother takes photos of them looking like clowns at her kitchen table, they buy matching charm bracelets (hers is half a heart saying Best, Julie’s is the other saying Friend), and sometimes they just sit in her backyard and dig up earthworms to keep as pets (of course, they forget to feed them and they die, shriveled up at the bottom of a plastic bucket on her deck, every time).

In sixth grade, she and Julie have one of their many slumber parties. Usually they sleep upstairs in Julie’s bunk beds but it’s a hot summer night and the fan in Julie’s room is broken. The basement is the most recently remodeled part of their house and, therefore, the only part with central air. She and Julie decide to build a blanket fort, kidnapping every chair and linen they can find and smuggling them downstairs with them. They knock it down four times in the process of construction, giggling the whole way, before they get it to stand upright. “Our kingdom,” Julie smiled, and Kitty can still remember the cute gap between her teeth before she’d gotten braces as she’d smiled.

They haul enough potato chips and candy into it to feed a small country and pass out somewhere around midnight in a coma of sugar.

She stirs in her sleep a few hours later feeling so hot in her sleeping bag. She turns her head to look up from where she’s lying, on her stomach, in her sleeping bag and then she’s suffocating. There’s someone on top of her and then a hand pressed against her and all she can hear is “Sssh, Kitty, it’s just me.”

Bill is athletic in the hard-muscled way that makes him about two-hundred pounds of brute strength. She is still tiny and fragile, like a baby bird.

She tries to speak and he shoves a piece of her blue-and-red sleeping bag (her mom had bought her it new, just a week ago, for the Brownie’s campout coming up) into her mouth before jamming a hand underneath her pajama top. She tries to cry for Julie, who is lying across their makeshift tent, but nothing comes out. So tears blur her vision and all can she see, splayed face down as he touches her (as each touch burns a mark in her pale skin along the way) is the way the flashlight he brought blazes into their sheet walls, engulfing her in a castle of flames.

:…:

When she tiptoes out the next morning and walks the two miles home, she leaves her sleeping bag lying on the floor of Julie’s basement, ashes from the fire.

:…:

Her first year of junior high, Kitty is gone almost a whole month. When her parents find out…there’s a lot of therapy and a lot of priests who say God is the answer and a lot of support groups. There’s a lot of time for her to just lie on her bed, wondering why it had to be her. Trying to figure out if this boy likes her, why he didn’t try to kiss her first like boys do in movies. She wants to cry but she can’t, especially when her mother is sitting in the kitchen with the pastor across the table. Especially since she's gripping her cup of coffee so tight Kitty can see the blood rushing to her fingers as she breathes, “But he was such a nice boy.”

:…:

The second match strikes on a Thursday afternoon.

She stops at her locker to switch her Language Arts book out for Social Studies and is putting her combination into her lock when someone knocks her binder out of her arms. 

“Slut,” She whips around, eyes widening and comes face-to-face with Julie.

Here is the girl who she considered a sister, who she told everything to, and all she can see in her familiar eyes is hatred. “You heard me,” She hisses, crossing her arms over her chest. “You’re a little whore who is telling lies about my brother just to get attention.”

Her tongue goes dry as she tries to form words, “I-I-”

“Shut up,” Another girl, Megan, who sits at their lunch table supplies from behind Julie.

“No-one wants to hear anymore lies coming out of your mouth.”

She breaks through the wall of seething girls and runs and runs and runs until she’s outside, on the soccer field. She drops to her knees and cries, silent, empty sobs that no-one can hear as they burn her rib cage, trying to claw their way out of her.

:…:

She doesn’t last another year at Carmel before she invokes her right to school choice, transferring to McKinley. She pulls all of Katherine “Katie” Wilde’s feelings out and puts them into a little brown box. She puts all her friendship tokens and movie stubs, her pictures from the mall photo booth and her copy of “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret” (Julie’s favorite book, she knows better now: God isn’t listening, not to her) in and traps them there. She places it delicately on top of the bonfire pit in her back yard, careful to make sure the broken tree branches and twigs cradle it just right.

She throws the final flickering match on and watches as her childhood goes up in a blaze before her eyes, screaming in silent agony as it dies.

:…:

She dies her hair blond before she starts at McKinley and makes her parents start calling her Kitty.

They seem so happy that she’s done locking herself in her bedroom that they don’t say anything, but the fake smiles and the meaningful looks they exchange are enough. She gets onto the Cheerios with the confidence she practiced carefully in her mirror. She gets Jake Puckerman with a lingering hand and a flirty smile. She gets under Brittany’s skin with scathing comments placed in a Latino lesbian cheerleader-shaped hole.

This time she chips her kingdom out of rigid, sharp ice.

And Marley Rose almost takes a hammer and a chisel to it before she can even recognize the threat.

:…:

It’s difficult to say why Marley bothers her so much.

It should be that she steals Jake’s heart with such an ease that it makes it clear that he never liked Kitty for much beyond her ability to shake her ass on cue. It should be that while Kitty is barely hanging on to head cheerio by the skin of her teeth, Marley is made the new shining star of Glee club even though she isn’t half as good. It should be that she manages to pull off thrift-store hand-me downs while Kitty is swallowed in the safety of her perfectly tailored Cheerios uniform.

Maybe if she thought about it, which she doesn’t, it’s because Marley is everything Katie should have been. Maybe she’s just a powder keg waiting to catch a falling spark.

:…:

She doesn’t realize that Ryder Lynn might be a can of lighter fluid until it’s too late.

She sees his wide shoulders and his football uniform and the way he looks at Marley when it’s so obvious she’ll never be into him the way she’s into Jake. She sees him struggling with his schoolwork and trying to hide his dyslexia and the little way he frowns when he sees the D on his history paper. She sees a desperate target.

And the next thing she knows, she’s sitting in front of a computer with an IM window open and giving him advice. It’s almost too easy, use the internet to build up his confidence and then smash it back down. It starts out as payback, no-one calls Kitty Wilde a bitch and gets away with it.

Except for some reason she uses the name Katie.

:…:

He asks to meet up with her and she recoils as if she’s been burned.

She’s seen You’ve Got Mail enough times to know she is not Meg Ryan and he is definitely no Tom Hanks. So she signs off and tries to put it behind her. She’s Kitty Wilde, she has better things to be doing than cyber-troll a worthless scalpel jock like Ryder Lynn anyways.

And then something pulls her back and she takes it too far. She knows making a fake Facebook is the sort of lame needy thing that girls who have faces and asses like hers don’t need to resort to, but she does it anyways. And when she hears from one of the band geeks that Ryder took “Katie” into the choir room and sang to her before confessing his love for her, she almost regrets it.

Katie’s been locked in a box in the back of her heart so long, she seems to fall in love on impact though.

:…:

When her phone rings in the choir room after the shooting, she thinks it might be over.

She thinks that for sure he’ll find out, especially given that she and Britt have the Cheerios wardrobe, identical to a T. When he confronts her though, she goes on the offensive. She picks out all the little things about him she knows will hurt, because Katie might like him but Kitty is mad because of course he only suspects her after he’d already accused his precious Marley because everything is always about Marley. She promises to meet him at 3:30 and then she stands in the auditorium with the rest of Glee club instead.

She won’t burn again this time.

:…:

She is playing 4 Pics 1 Word.

She can have two windows open on her phone at the same time. Just like she can hate him for the goofy way he sings along to You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling and die inside because he’s looking at her and smiling while he forms the words simultaneously.

:…:

She feels the match light inside of her.

The sound of his voice and the raw emotion in Everybody Hurts make it feel someone’s singing her life right back to her. The look on his face is exactly the way she’s always felt inside, but could never, ever let penetrate her perfect, shallow, bitchy exterior. What would the world think if Kitty Wilde suddenly became torn and fragile and broken? It just wasn't an option. And she wants to punch Sam Evans in the face when he says that Ryder is living every guy’s wet dream. She wants to tell him that having someone take away your choice, to take something you weren’t willing to give is anything but a fantasy. It’s like a little miniature hell that no-one will ever, ever be able to pull you out of from you. And you can feel the Devil's flames engulfing your skin, but you can never, ever repent your way back into heaven. For once though, she can’t find the tongue lashing she’s looking for.

So she looks down into her lap and tries not to let out the hot, angry tears that threaten to spill onto her cheeks.

:…:

She asks him to Breadsticks.

She wants to tell him she’s Katie, that she understands so much and he’s opened her up too and that she’s sorry she keeps bailing but she’s just not good at this...this _feelings_ thing. Like seriously, she couldn’t even keep Puck around and she's practically a carbon copy of Quinn Fabray before she swiped her v-card. Except she can’t, because he still thinks she’s drier than the cast of Hot in Cleveland at the thought of him. He still thinks she chose him as a friend out of necessity. He barely wants to be friends with her the way she is now, why would he want anything more?

So she tells him about Julie’s brother and how he crawled into her sleeping bag the same simple way she told the shrink. She tells him how maybe no-one else understands, but she does. And the word “Katie” is on the tip of her tongue, but then he takes her hand. 

And she’s suddenly on fire, but in a good way for once in her miserable, sham of a life. And her mouth is too dry to form anything but a smile.

:...:

She decides to catfish him one last time.

Kitty likes Ryder now, so much, too much even. And she likes being Katie because she knows it makes him happy, and seeing him smile... It’s getting harder and harder to mask the flip-flops of her stomach at his little grin, especially when she's the one making it happen. So she listens to him rant about how this is working for him and then he asks her if it’s working for her too.

And Katie tells her first lie.

The thing is, Katie was real once but she’s not anymore. Katie was a crutch that she’s outgrown, now she’s a new, better Kitty. She still has a kingdom, but it’s not built on melting ice or burning wood. This castle has a real foundation. Friendships with people who really care about her for better or worse. People who believe in her and her ability to do good things and think she’s talented.

So she walks into the library and interrupts Ryder, taking a breather as Katie. She needs to know he can like her for who she is, not the Katie fantasy she can never be. And the thing is, he can’t. Not right now, not while this perfect bubble of a girl hangs over him and when she presses send on the message she had pre-typed on her phone, he doesn’t even try to chase after her. She’s not Meg Ryan, after all, even if he is Tom Hanks. And this time the tears fall freely down her cheeks as soon as she’s safely in the bathroom.

The thing is, he might not be able to bring her kingdom down to ashes anymore, but it still burns like hell until the flame extinguishes.

  


**Author's Note:**

> So this definitely won't be canon next week but I don't care. I will just be upset if Katie isn't Kitty, okay?


End file.
